by Leigh Kelsey
The more people looked at her like she was evil, like something was inherently wrong with her, the more that poison seeped into Kati’s subconscious. She knew she was quieter in classes than when she’d arrived; her self-defence mechanism had gone right past resting bitch face and snarling warnings to subdued smallness, as if everyone would forget that Kati existed if she didn’t draw attention to herself.
She hated those assholes for that most of all, even more than the bullshit they spewed about Theo. Kati had come to SBA combative, ready to fight for her right to be at the school but prepared to be forced to leave. And now she was just letting them get away with it. How had she become so passive, letting Rahmi and Naia and Gull bloody Llewellyn stand up for her?
Yet if she stood up for herself, everyone would see it as proof of her violent nature, of her evil. But did she really care what everyone thought as long as her new friends didn’t doubt her?
Kati really wished she knew. She rolled over twice, the covers pulled over her head to block out the rising dawn, and eventually fell asleep.
WHAT’S A LITTLE MURDER TALK BETWEEN FRIENDS?
It was Saturday—finally, the soulsdamned weekend!—so Kati didn’t bother to get out of bed until the sun had firmly set, even if she could hear Naia opening and closing concrete-slab-sized books every now and then and Rahmi rattling around with beakers and vials, no doubt brewing another potion.
After a while of laying there, her body thoroughly cushioned by the four-poster bed, listening to their noise, Kati climbed out of bed with a groan. Her neck and shoulders ached like mad, probably because she’d been tense even in sleep, but the sleep-in kept her in a good mood as she gathered a change of clothes and aimed for the bathroom.
“Evening,” Naia said brightly, her eyes alight with studious frenzy behind her glasses, no doubt thanks to the book in her lap. She had to get bruises, resting books like that.
“Yep,” Kati said, struggling to socialise thanks to the caffeine deficiency in her bloodstream.
Twenty minutes later, clean and dressed, she sank into the squashy cushions of the sofa beside Rahmi—squinting at a vial of emerald green liquid as she held it to the light—and groaned as she sipped her coffee, another of Rahmi’s elixirs added to it like a shot of caramel but way more energising.
“You missed some good gossip at breakfast,” Rahmi informed her, slanting a look at Kati. “You know how everyone said the third-year guy was killed by ritual magic?”
Kati nodded, her stomach squirming.
“Well, he wasn’t. Gull was talking about it—loudly, you know how he gets—and Miz Jardin said it was nonsense, that there were no runes or sigils on the body at all, that he’d been poisoned. And then she started saying she shouldn’t have told us any of that, but Gull managed to get her to tell us what poison it was—Cotton Decay.”
Kati nodded. They’d only just begun learning basic poisons in P&P, but although Cotton Decay was an advanced poison, she knew what it could do. Using the venom of a cottonmouth snake, combined with a sprinkling of coffin dust, it resulted in the rapid decay of a victim’s flesh.
“So,” Kati said slowly. “Not a ritual murder then. But why the shift in M.O.? Unless they were killed by separate people?”
Rahmi shrugged. “I was wondering the same thing. Maybe next time they’ll use a different method—maybe they’re figuring out what works for them.”
“Next time!” Naia exclaimed, her head shooting up and her glasses slipping off the end of her nose. Her thick black hair was neatly twined into a plait but Kati knew it would be ragged by the end of the day; somehow endless studying was hell on Naia’s hair. “What makes you think there’ll be a next time?”
“Who just kills two people?” Rahmi swirled the poison in her vial, rather ominously Kati thought. “It’s such a bland number, two. Three’s much better.”
Kati stared at her. “You’re kinda scary sometimes, you know that, Qureshi? I’m glad you’re a friend, not an enemy.”
Rahmi smiled, a quick whip of a grin. “Says the girl getting advanced spells lessons and nailing every single one of them.”
Kati rolled her eyes, gulping down coffee. “They’re just defensive spells, don’t get excited.”
“Defensive spells you can bludgeon someone to death with,” Rahmi pointed out. She’d been very interested to learn about Kati’s latest lessons, and made Kati swear to teach her the spell when she’d mastered it.
Kati smirked, draining her mug and reaching for a cinnamon bun from a pile of dining-hall-filched pastries on the coffee table. “Poisons are still deadlier than spells.”
“Not necessarily,” Naia cut in. “Did you know Ingrid the Terrible once peeled the skin off one of her enemies while keeping it intact, in perfect human shape, and keeping the woman alive even with her skin peeled?”
Kati’s eyes flew wide. “Souls. Maybe we’re all pretty terrifying. Why do you look so excited about the idea of skinning someone, Naia?”
“I don’t.” Naia averted her eyes but a little smile clung to her lips. “I’m just saying, spells can be dangerous too.”
“Good thing we’re not enrolled in a school that teaches dangerous spells, deadly potions, poisoning, and how to raise the dead.” Kati made her eyes widen. “Oh wait…”
“Good thing for us,” Rahmi laughed, “bad thing for everyone else.”
SKULLBALL BATTLE ROYALE
With nothing better to do that night Kati, Rahmi, and Naia went out to the training grounds behind the academy, the long stretch of grass skirted on one side by the lake and framed on the other by the woods. It looked magical at night, the stars and moon reflecting off the silver surface of the water, something in its depths sending up ripples—whether it was a giant eel or not remained to be proven—and the floodlights catching on what at first Kati assumed was a football but which turned out to be a skull sailing through the air.
“You’ve gotta be kidding me,” Kati said, laughing. “A tenner says Gull Llewellyn is behind this.”
“Yep,” Naia agreed, pointing at a lanky, blonde-haired figure across the grounds barreling down on what Kati hoped was his opponent but honestly could have been a teammate. “There he is.”
“Ladies!” he crowed upon seeing them, jogging over. Today he was dressed in a Monster Energy Drink shirt and jeans that were so frayed they shouldn’t have been wearable, a backwards baseball cap on his head and a tuft of hair poking through the gap. “Come to partake in our battle royale?”
Naia shook her head fiercely. “Nope. Sports are not for me. No, thank you.”
He pressed a hand to his heart. “You wound me, Naia Clarke. Rahmi? Kati?”
“Yeah, alright,” Kati agreed readily, stripping off her jacket and handing it to Naia since she wasn’t playing. “What are the rules?”
“Same as football but the ball’s an enchanted skull, that tree’s our goal, and that glowing line in the grass is theirs.”
“Hey!” someone yelled across the field, stuck up sounding and borderline whiny. Kati recognised him as the guy who’d complained about having to walk from the bus to SBA’s front doors. Poor baby was probably used to being chauffeured everywhere. Kati bet he almost had a hernia when he saw the cronky, dirt-smeared bus waiting to transport them. “You can’t just add new players!”
“Watch me, Alders!” Gull shouted back. “Qureshi?”
“Oh, I’m so in,” Rahmi said, a wicked grin on her face. She made sure her hijab was pinned securely in place and ran onto the makeshift pitch. “But I warn you, I was the star player in my high school’s football team. I’m a teeny bit competitive.”
Kati snorted, sharing a look with Gull. “Why do I get the feeling that’s an understatement.”
“I’ve created a monster,” Gull lamented. He smiled, trying to catch Naia’s eye, but her attention had already drifted to one of the books she always carried around with her, this one about English supernatural politics of the twenty-first century. “Sure I can’t tempt you to pl
ay, Naia?”
Naia glanced up, then back down again. “I’m sure. You guys go have fun, I’ll watch from over here.”
“Do me a favour,” Kati asked her, “and get a picture of me playing. I need to send some evidence of normal student-like behaviour to my mum. She’s threatening to remove me. She thinks the whole school’s full of danger and evil.”
“But … we’re necromancers and reapers. Of course it is.”
“Try telling my mum that.” Kati jogged backward, keeping an eye out for the ball. Skull. Whatever. “Just make it look like I’m having a totally regular and harmless term here.”
Naia gave Kati a dubious smile. “I’ll do my best.”
Thirty minutes in and Kati’s team was losing. Atrociously. Kati had always been better at rugby, where she could bulldoze through her opponent, than at football, where skill and swiftness were more necessary. But she wasn’t used to losing.
“Where did you find the damn skull anyway?” Kati asked Gull, who’d nearly leapt into her to avoid the speeding path of the skull. It was more projectile than football at this point.
“Round the west side,” Gull answered. “Nice one Rahmi!” he shouted as she tackled the skull off the other team’s midfielder and made a run for the goal.
Kati watched with bated breath, and yelled with everyone else when the skull went soaring past the goal line. Well, tree. That put them at two goals down, rather than three.
“Found it yesterday,” Gull said, turning to Kati again, “when me and Harley were messing about looking for the Stolen Tower.”
“Did you find it?” Kati asked dubiously, keeping an eye out for the skull.
“Did we fuck. But we did find a mummified squirrel and some bones. Figured we’d make good use of them.”
“By turning them into a football,” Kati drawled. “I’m sure whoever the bones belonged to really appreciates that.”
Gull snorted. “I’d love it if it were me.”
“Yeah,” Kati agreed. “I know you would. Fucking weirdo.”
Gull grinned, thrilled with the insult. “We’re friends now, you know. You called me a weirdo, I called you an asshole, that’s it, we’re bonded for life.”
Kati frowned, sticking out her foot for the ball and passing it to Harley, Gull’s skater girl friend, across the pitch. “You never called me an asshole.”
“Not to your face,” Gull replied, deadpan.
“Prick,” Kati muttered, but not in a combative way. “You’re right, it does look like we’re mates.”
Souls, did that mean Kati had four friends?
“Watch this,” Gull said in response, taking the skull off Rahmi and making a run across the pitch, weaving in and around the other team, his wand in his left hand. “Try and catch me, Mayhew!” he cackled, this at the brawny pink-haired girl who was hot on his tail.
Kati snorted, watching him flick his wand, his legs blurring under an obvious speed spell, but before she could see him score, a white light rushed into her vision. It blotted out the training green, the woods, and the edge of the silver lake; it covered everything around her.
Kati staggered but didn’t fall, her balance unaffected but her sight utterly gone, only white visible in every direction. She could still hear the shouts of people cheering Gull on, and a roar rose, indicating that he’d scored, but she couldn’t see anything.
Except … there, was that something? That shape? Kati squinted at it, her heart pounding, and the shape resolved into a podium. With a sinking feeling, she recognised it as the podium Lavellian stood behind as he gave his lectures on old supernatural battles and the history of necromancer and reaper society.
This was a vision—it had to be. Kati could still hear the shouts of skullball players around her, the odd cry of pain as it connected with increasingly vulnerable body parts, Harley’s vicious cackle as she kicked it back at the other team, but all she could see was the blank space, and the podium across from her. No classroom desks or whiteboard, no walls, just the podium. Until, her head flaring with an ache, a cabinet appeared softly glowing behind it.
Kati’s stomach twisted, a bad feeling rising in her like nausea as the cabinet doors flew open to expose stacks of history books, regular, innocuous, except for one that shone with the same pearly glow as the space around her.
Kati didn’t walk over to it, daren’t move in case the skullball slammed into her and knocked her out while she was blind to the training fields, but the second she glared at the glowing textbook, seeing it fully, the vision released her, its job complete.
Kati stumbled back, blinking as the field returned around her, rushing out of the white nothingness like a city rising from fog. Her eyes cleared a split second before the skull rolled her way; with a bit of difficulty, she kicked it over to Rahmi who grinned and sped off with it, scoring yet another goal.
By the end of the match, it was a draw, but Gull’s team were celebrating as if they’d won the Levby league cup. Kati let their cheers and taunts to the other team pass over her like water off a duck’s back, collecting her coat from Naia and plopping down in the grass beside her friend.
“Kati?” Naia asked, peering into her eyes. “Are you alright? You look … sick?”
Kati pulled her bottom lip between her teeth, debating keeping the vision a secret, but Naia and Rahmi had helped with the dream, and they’d all known there was a chance Kati would have another vision.
“I saw something else,” she whispered, leaning closer to Naia. “A book in Lavellian’s classroom, glowing like it wanted me to know it was there. I think there’s another message in it.”
Naia’s eyes flew wide. “What kind of book?”
Kati’s forehead creased, a headache forming between her eyes. “A textbook, I think. I don’t know what’s special about it, but next history lesson, I need to find it. It didn’t feel like Theo talking to me this time, I don’t think it’s him, but…”
Naia closed her book and put her hand on Kati’s arm, squeezing. “But what?”
“The last time I had a vision, someone turned up dead. What if this time…”
“We need to tell someone. Madam Hawkness, or Mrs Balham. Didn’t she say she was head of security?”
Kati nodded, pushing to her feet when Naia scrambled up, fumbling to put her books away in her bag. “Madam Hawkness told me to go straight to her if I had another dream, but this wasn’t a dream, Naia.”
“Still.” Naia gestured for Rahmi—currently swaddled in a group of overexcited, victorious skullball players. Her face was flushed with exertion, her eyes bright, at least until she jogged over and saw the expressions on their faces.
“What’s up?”
“I had another one,” Kati admitted quietly, twisting her amethyst ring around and around her finger. “A vision.”
“We need to go to the headteacher,” Naia added, already turning up the gentle slope to the back door of the academy. “Right now.”
LONG LIVE SUPERIOR ASSHOLES
Madam Hawkness should have by all rights assumed Kati was mad, and told her to get out of her office when she explained that she’d had a vision in the middle of a football match—carefully leaving out the bit about the glowing textbook Kati wanted to investigate—but instead she took her completely seriously.
Even Kati thought she herself was mad at this point, but the headteacher drew her wand—pearly white, the Angel-Wand, downfall of Lady LaVoire—and told them to stay in her office while she went to investigate the supernatural history classroom.
Forty-two minutes later, she’d returned, blood on her peacock blue cloak, and told them that one of SBA’s cleaners had been stabbed. The woman hadn’t seen her assailant—he’d been cloaked and concealed with a charm—but she’d identified him as a male, ruling out both of Madam Hawkness’s suspects to Kati’s immense relief, and as a necromancer. Why else would he use an athame to attack the woman?
For now, Kati was in the clear. But the fact that a man had attacked Catherine Hopwell, cleaner e
xtraordinaire, unsettled Kati for two reasons. One—anyone who knew that Mr Worth was really Mr LaVoire would switch straight from blaming Kati to blaming him. And two—what if they were right? Could she really trust him?
Yes, her gut insisted, but she was too smart to offer blind trust. She’d known him weeks, and they’d only properly spoken once. She couldn’t base her judgement of him solely on that. Even if he continued to defend her, to help her, and offer kindness while expecting nothing in return, doubts crept into her mind.
The students, however, had a totally different suspect in mind, and this was worse. Way worse.
“I don’t think he ever left,” a girl in the back of their P&P class whispered to her friend across the aisle. “I reckon he’s still here, hiding in the crypts, or in a tower somewhere we can’t find him.”
“Careful,” someone in the dining hall whispered at a table behind Kati and her friends, “if she hears you talking shit about her, she might tell her brother, and he’ll creep out of his hiding place and kill you next.”
Theo. Everyone thought the killer was Theo.
By the end of the next week, even Kati had started to question if Theo had really gone on the run, or if he’d found somewhere to hide at the academy. He wasn’t running around attacking people of course—even if Kati had begun to question his version of events of that night in the woods, she knew he wasn’t a killer—but what if everyone was right? Could he have found somewhere in the academy to remain secret?
The only downside to this hope was that Kati was too logical to let optimism reign. Second Breath Academy was ruled by a headteacher who’d taken down the most dangerous, power-crazed, egomaniac reaper of all time. The thought of Theo evading her was laughable.